Dancing to the end of love: Bright Star

The opening credits hover over a close-up of needle going through fabric. The image speaks to the diligence and nimbleness needed to craft clothes, poetry or prolonged, unconsummated desire. It also lets us know that Bright Star will diligently hunker down for the worm’s-eye view should it yield another sharpened physical detail for writer/director Jane Campion to weave into this tapestry-like romance, something best surrendered to as with a current. Just lie on your back and watch the patterns unfold.

John Keats died young, and if his poetry went woefully underappreciated during his life at least it was redeemed by the not easily earned devotion of its muse. Bright Star, though inspired by Andrew Motion’s Keats biography, isn’t about Keats. It doesn’t burn much celluloid trying to turn writerly brooding or hand-numbing penmanship into cinema. Its protagonist is instead young middleclass seamstress Fanny Brawne, the first girl in all of Hamstead Heath to have a triangular pleated mushroom collar. When she first meets Keats—the year is 1818—she challenges the reverence aimed at the poet’s vocation, championing handsome, useful, innovative and well-made clothing over delicate words of limited practical power. The antagonism between Fanny (Abbie Cornish) and Keats (Ben Whishaw) is kept honest through the ubiquity of Keats sidekick Charles Brown (Paul Schneider), a Scottish poet as big, burly and gruff as Keats was elfin, diminutive and soft-spoken. Their intriguingly un-straightforward triangle is just one of many forces working against the fulfillment of Fanny and Keats, another being Keats’ poverty. But as imagined here, theirs was a love emboldened by ceaseless tension. The film’s vivacity is the product of a harmonious collaboration between sensitive camerawork, production design, scoring and actors, at least one of whom giving the first outstanding work of what promises to be an outstanding career.

Cornish’s performance is of the sort where you can’t decide whether it’s a case of a role being perfectly cast or whether the actor’s invested the role so generously with some secret culled from within that she’s made alternate interpretations unthinkable. That confusion of unfamiliar and overwhelming emotions that clutches youth can be read in Cornish’s face and distracted hands especially. Imperious and anxious, she has the sort of face that when directed at you makes you uncertain if her gaze is one of derision or desire. What isn’t ambiguous is that you have her complete attention. Complimenting Cornish, Whishaw picks up where his Dylan-via-Rimbuad in I’m Not There left off, every smile teasing, every adoring glance half-misted over with the young poet’s inclination to admire Beauty in general as to recognize it in the specifics of his lover’s person. It works very well, while Schneider seems to growing into himself as an actor more and more—he’s more suited to this sort of bullying and jealous dreamer than he was to the agonized young lover in All the Real Girls.

So our stars are exceptional in their roles as young lovers, leaving us with the more difficult question of whether or not this sort of young love translates into exceptional movies, a question Bright Star doesn’t easily resolve. It seems perfectly unconcerned with the proscribed meter of classical storytellng, but the rhythm it adopts instead is almost unintentionally lulling, swerving from bliss to ennui, going up and down with young love’s customary tumult. The film possesses no shortage of moments sublime or nearly so, but these moments don’t add up to a great deal of momentum. So be it. Swooning heights of beauty and feeling trump structural rigour, and that’s fine by me.

What Campion excels at here is fidelity to the subjective experience of her characters, which requires both the acknowledgement of societal limitations—such as the presumptions made by Brown and others that young women are poorly fit to comprehend poetry—and a way of evoking sensuality that embraces the transcendental. In dealing with the latter challenge, Bright Star seems to share a certain kinship with the films of Terrence Malick, The New World most especially, not only because of its star-crossed period romance but because of its grounding in the celebration of nature found in poetry. Chalk it up to mimetic license: a poetic movie about poetry, and one teeming with loveliness.

Poetry has to make its way between: Robert Bringhurst's Everywhere Being is Dancing

“I like thick socks and heavy shirts because I live in a cold country, but all my theories are threadbare.” So states poet, linguist, essayist and typographer Robert Bringhurst in his foreword to Everywhere Being is Dancing: Twenty Pieces of Thinking (Gaspereau Press, $31.95), clarifying from the outset that a theory must above all be useful, like a compass in the wilderness, a way to navigate your path through some thorny terrain. Bringhurst distinguishes between theory and meaning: meaning was already there; theory simply allows us to consider it, or renovate our comfortable ways of considering it.

Everywhere Being is a companion piece to Bringhurst’s The Tree of Meaning. Everything is the previous book was meant to be spoken. Everything in this new book was meant to be read. The unifying theme is interconnectivity, and Bringhurst approaches the theme by examining the work of such varied figures as Aristotle, Don McKay and Joan Miró. It’s a titanic, unruly theme, and I’m trying to avoid telling you to just read the damn book. At the risk of making excuses for my own critical deficiencies, I feel it necessary to note that it’s a strength of Bringhurst’s essays that they don’t easily lend themselves to neat summation. As with poetry, as with music, a certain basic meaning can be located only in the linkage of one idea to the next.

In the titular essay, Bringhurst tries to explain how poetry is a form of knowing. So far, so obvious –but the beauty lies precisely in the way Bringhurst illuminates what we already know so that we know it better. Bringhurst’s talent with etymological dissection is on par with that of Fred Wah, and he examines root words in Chinese, early Greek and Navajo to call attention to the differences between poetry as knowing, as a reflection of “what-is,” and poetry as artifice, or “what-is-made.”

Particularly interesting is Bringhurst’s realization, new to me at least, that industrialization and the development of verse styles –not to mention, somewhat more abstractly, the development of nostalgia for nature– have emerged in tandem historically. The Navajo for example, while having had different terms for separate genres of poetry, never had a term for verse before colonization. Poetry and verse are not, in Bringhurst’s estimation, at all one and the same.

“At worst,” Bringhurst writes, verse “is merely a grate through which language is pushed.” He suggests that verse, ideally, which is to say, verse as genuine, “knowing:” poetry, has less to do with the limits of any given language, and should rather be most closely tied to human physiology, specifically to breathing. When compressed into a taut conclusion these ideas might sound almost banal, but Bringhurst’s method of approaching these ideas is sophisticated and compelling.

I’ve already used up well over half of my allotted column addressing only the first of 20 or so essays in this book, but it’s the first for a reason. It holds a sort of key for regarding the rest of these consistently stimulating, insightful and humble pieces, for understanding just what Bringhurst is getting at when he calls Glenn Gould “the most colossally improbable of all Canadian poets” or why Bringhurst urges us to read a work of Haida oral literature, in an essay about storytelling and translation that itself is written with an unmistakable flair for storytelling and translation.

In ‘Licking the Lips with a Forked Tongue’ Bringhurst describes how a simple desire to spark a poem from a comment made by someone else, as well as a growing interest in polyphonic music, led him to create texts in which different voices can speak at once through the layering of colour-coded lines. He found that musicians were more able to perform the poem than trained actors (something I discovered myself some years ago when I wrote a play that climaxes with three simultaneous monologues), that harmonization is a concept as jarring to orators as it is natural to musicians. Along the way to explaining this Bringhurst also articulates for me why I’ve always been drawn more to chamber music than symphonic: “In a group of four or five, there is room for both complexity and simplicity to breathe.”

I close with my response to this particular essay on polyphony because it struck me as being particularly, well, poetic, in the way it zeroed in on the conflict between language and meaning, between artifice and a purity so pure as to nearly evaporate when regarded by the likes of mere humans. Since he puts it best, I’ll let Bringhurst have the last word:

“I’m quite convinced that poetry is part of the larger world and not a specifically human possession or creation. When poetry gets utterly absorbed in human affairs or narrowly enmeshed in human language, it is apt to lose its vigor. Yet, as humans, we are trapped in some degree in human language and have to make of it what we can. To the enterprise of thinking, talk is every bit as dangerous as song. Poetry has to make its way between.”

(This column originally appeared in Vue Weekly, 20/12/2007)

The Poet Hangs On: Margaret Atwood's The Door

It is very difficult to disassociate Margaret Atwood from Canada, at least for Canadians. Her distinctive voice—low, wry, at times a parody of liturgical, never burdened with excess inflection, though sometimes burdened by an excess of irony—functions as a sort of collective conscience, a running commentary on our nebulous sensibility. For those Canadians who still consider the role of writers in our cultural life important, those for whom literary conceits possess meaning beyond the invented worlds for which they were devised, Atwood has ascended to assume the role of our national Oracle.

Atwood turns 68 this month. It has been more than a decade since her last collection of poetry appeared, a decade in which she seems to have fully cemented her stature as a novelist of the highest order. When you read her new poetry collection The Door (McClelland & Stewart, $22.99), you’re inevitably led to question the significance of poetry in an era so seemingly disinterested in it, in the life of a writer who these days has become so famous for doing other kinds of writing, a prolific yet scrupulous writer who has arguably reached an age when writers start getting more particular about how they plan to spend the rest of their career.

Poetry, alternately rendered as something both fragile and immense, is the overt subject of several poems in The Door. In “The Poets Hang On,” Atwood considers the obsolescence of poets, virtual panhandlers who “have that irritating look / of those who know more than we do,” yet have “forgotten how to tell us / how sublime we are.” In the opening lines of “Possible Activities” she regards literary habit with the tone of one annoyed by another who “could sit on your chair and pick over language / as if it were a bowl of peas.” In “Poetry Reading” she endures a poetic performance long enough to finally surrender to it, allowing herself to be moved while recognizing that “there’s a cold craft to it, as with beadwork / or gutting a mackerel.”

These pieces, to say the least, don’t take their relevance for granted. The poems about poetry set the others in relief, engaging a process through which the reader can see this diverse collection as cohesive, a clear, unhurried train of thought, of artistic and even moral logic rivers its way through. We see the “point” of this activity, and don’t need to ask ourselves why the talented Ms Atwood isn’t doing “more important things.” Poetry in The Door, not unlike the prose work in Atwood’s recent volume The Tent, is facilitating a dialogue between Atwood’s most personal reflections and her reflections on her country and the world and the tumult in which they collaborate. Yes, the tone overall slips from the wistfulness of memories fading, to the playful otherness of animals and children, to mortality, apocalypse and, slightly more optimistically, the mystery of our collective future.

The strikingly morbid poem “War Photo” makes a nice appendix to Susan Sontag’s final book Regarding the Pain of Others, finding beauty and solace and finally saying a kind of prayer for a nameless dead victim of some atrocity. I especially liked the unambiguously themed “Weather.” Like “Dutiful,” “Weather” tries to figure out how guilty one should feel about issues clearly greater than any individual action. Climate change is conveyed with awe and alienation, with unease toward our culpability in the climate’s new layer of threat to human life. Weather is “blind and deaf and stupendous,” Atwood writes, “and has no mind of its own ... 

       Or does it? What if it does? 

       Suppose you were to pray to it, 

      what would you say?”

I don’t know if it’s because I always hear Atwood’s actual voice when I read her poetry, but hers strikes me always as a voice of authority. (Even when that voice comes across as too arch, which it rarely does here.) In “The Poet Has Come Back ...” Atwood implies that the poet’s authority can be maintained so long as the poet remains outsider and outlaw. In “Another Visit to the Oracle” this authority is summoned up in humorous and tremendous language that surveys the most frightful blind corners of modern life and carves out some role for the writer in it, ending with a summation that’s memorably piercing and unafraid to take up the torch of the great seer.

      “I’ll tell your story – 

      your story that was once so graceful 

      but now it is dark. 

      That’s what I do: 

      I tell dark stories 

      before and after they come true.”